There is something fundamentally ambivalent about Natasha Langridge’s
play. On its uppermost narrative level, the idea of a love story
between members of two opposing groups has been a classic at least
since Romeo And Juliet.
However, the Northern Irishman in me sees something hackneyed in “love
across the barricades” plays... especially when a physical barrier
divides the stage for much of the 80 minutes of Lisa Goldman’s
production.

Pearl is a Romany girl living on a (legal) site in east London about to
be cleared for the Olympic swimming pool; Joe is a gorger
(house-dweller) who falls for both her and the culture. As he wants in,
she wants out... out, at least, of her more or less arranged marriage;
eventually, they run away together, but with no clear idea of where
they may go or how live.

Langridge has researched the Romany world, and does not stint in her
picture of a dignified culture with its own cherished heritage and
codes. Far from being the thieving workshy pikeys of popular prejudice
(embodied here by the character of Joe’s father), these Romanies work
industriously but for themselves rather than as “wage slaves”, and
Pearl’s mother grieves that her daughter will not find a husband after
she has been “out a night”. Pearl herself coldly parodies the gypsy
fortune-telling routine which her grandmother once engaged in sincerely
(at first), and to which she herself resorts as a short-term moneymaker.

Yet this embodies the ambiguity in the play: Pearl ridicules the
too-credulous kids she fleeces, but those kids’ sense of exotica also
runs through Langridge’s writing. It is generously spiced with Romany
words and locutions, such that the pronoun “ye” comes to chime as
heavily and self-defeatingly as “thee” in lazy depictions of American
Puritans or Amish. Joe’s account of the Romany fair at Appleby in
Cumbria is rhapsodically overwritten.

Alex Waldmann may not be vocally convincing as Hackney boy Joe, but he
gives the most physically articulate performance I have yet seen from
him. Jade Williams, though rightly not a clichéd dark jewel of a
figure, does not bewitch as Pearl needs to, in the way that Anna
Carteret commands the stage as her grandmother... apart from a wildly
misjudged, undignified dance interlude, which once again testifies to
the outside-in perspective that hobbles the entire venture.